The Gambler
by Dragon of Dispair
Summary: WFC Dark!Praxus AU - Favors can be gained, traded and lost, but they are never forgotten.


Fandoms: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Transformers Generation One

Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Characters: Smokescreen, Ratchet, OC

Tags: Alternate Universe, Cannon-Typical violence, Asexual Character, Gender-neutral Pronouns, Headcannon, Worldbuilding

Summary: WFC Dark!Praxus AU - Favors can be gained, traded and lost, but they are never forgotten.

Note: I'm all for using non-gendered pronouns for alien robots, but reading a whole fic of them is a bit jarring which is why I don't usually use them. In this case, however, it fit for a character who, even for a Cybertronian, is aggressively asexual.

Dark!Praxus AU series order (at the time of writing this and subject to change):

1- Sin City. (In progress)

2- What Happens in Praxus.

3- Gambler's Fallacy. (forthcoming)

4- Winning Hand (forthcoming and won't be posted until Gambler's Fallacy is finished even once written, title subject to change)

5- Cities in Dust (part six of the Livejournal Prompt Responses)

6 - The Gambler

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 **The Gambler**

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 _This mirror's in your mind_

 _And everyone wears a mask_

— Crüxshadows, " _Wake the White Queen_ "

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When Smokescreen fell unconscious, it was because a Decepticon with the body-frame similar to that of a leaper drone had crashed through the glass side of the building. Civilians were running and screaming and he wasn't just going to stand there and let this happen. A civilian himself, there wasn't much he could do to stop the big warframe. There were a couple of hotel security officers shooting at the Decepticon, but most of them had bigger things to worry about. Bullets sprayed and mechs died. He could hear emergency sirens of all sorts echoing from every corner of the Breakwater and beyond.

The Decepticon's EM field and swamped him with _hatred-revenge-battlefury_ even as its IFF overwhelmed his communications with the declaration of CHAINRAIDER / DECEPTICON / TOUCH ME AND I'LL RIP YOU APART.

Smokescreen was not stupid. He knew there wasn't anything he could do, really. He had some tactical programming left over from his time with the PPP, but no weapons and only civilian-grade armor. There was no way he was going toe-to-toe with a warframe in direct combat. Instead he did what he did best. He circled.

Step one: control the battlefield and you control the battle.

First, the civilians had to go. He did his best to round them up and direct them towards the exits. This wasn't a drill, a prank or a stunt, they needed to get out of here now and they needed to not clog the escape routes while they did it. Hundreds still greyed, littering the floor like trash, as the caught a stray bullet, a piece so shrapnel, a hit.

This, he thought, wasn't actually going to be much of a battle. Finally the civilians were clearing nicely, but security officers were built to restrain petty criminals, cheaters and pickpockets. There were some warframes on staff, but none on this floor and as they hadn't responded to security here's calls Smokescreen had to conclude they were dead or busy elsewhere.

But he was the only thing standing between the big purple Decepticon and the last of the civilians trickling out of this part of the casino.

Xe turned to him leveling xir chain gun, and panicked, he ducked behind a row of Trajectory machines. Bullets sprayed above his head, trashing the machines and he heard some screams of pain, the banshee howls of the dying, from some civvies who hand't yet made it out. It took almost an eighth of a breem for the chain gun to run out of bullets and when Smokescreen heard the tell-tale sound of xir arm transforming into a second weapon, he bolted for one of the downed security officers.

He'd been indentured to Breakwater for a very long time and for a long part of that he'd been… well, "friends" was too strong of a word, but "acquaintances" didn't fit either… with the now-gone head of security. He knew how security operated better than any other non-security employee at Breakwater.

For safety, their weapons didn't disengage from their frames when the bot died, but there was an emergency release hidden where the weapon attached to its wielder. It took him almost too long to find it, and then he was running back into cover with his stolen scatter blaster a micron ahead of a charge rifle's ionizing line of lightning. Near-miss or not, it still singed armor and shorted out circuits in his leg; he forced himself not to contemplate what a direct hit might do to him.

The thing roared and he heard the frustrated firing of jump thrusters, so he didn't stay crouched behind the Disaster's table, but kept moving. The shockwave of xir landing crushed tables and chairs and terminals around xer and Smokescreen barely escaped being thrown away himself. Even the near-misses and grazes and shrapnel left him with damage that was going to shut him down eventually. He was not a warframe. He wasn't even an law-enforcement Interceptor. He was a street-legal racing frame. Damage was not something he could take much of.

Control the battlefield. Control the battlefield, he kept chanting to himself trying to think of how the Pit he could even think to match a warframe in combat on the floor of a casino. There was plenty of cover, but it was all flimsy compared to a warframe's strength. Xe could just continue to chase him around until there was nothing left to hide behind. As long as xir sensors could find him…

Processing and movement and time itself slowed to a halt for just a moment. Sensors. Senses. What did he have here that could interfere with sensors? Because if xe couldn't see him, he could possibly sneak around to fire into the thing's back, where the armor over xir jump thrusters was by necessity thinner.

He didn't have time to mourn the dead civilian as he rifled through her subspace for anything useful. He came up with a pack of rust sticks — iron oxide coated energon — and a handful technically illegal circuit boosters. That she was an addict didn't lessen the tragedy of her death, but in this case was useful. He reached into the Adventure machine next to him and pulled out a wire and started assembling his makeshift grenade as the warframe continued to chase him around the room. When finished, he acivated the circuit booster, now embedded in the pack of candy threw it to the nearest fire detection sensor.

The small blaze did as Smokescreen had intended. A second later the air filled with cold CO2 and fire suppression foam. Wonderful for putting out fires; absolutely _slag_ for visibility.

It would only last about a breem, so he didn't waste time. He circled as fast as he could. He couldn't see either, but he could hear the warframe's frustrated roars and he knew the casino layout as well as it's designers.

Taking a chance, he aimed as best he could, and fired three shots at the vague shadow he was certain was the rampaging Decepticon.

Luck was with him for the first shot. He saw the sparks and short fires of major damage, but the second and third glanced uselessly off of armor as xe turned and charged blindly.

He went flying away from the hit, crashing into a nearby energon cart. It shattered beneath his weight and the fluid seeped into him to gum up his joints and glass shrapnel cut through tubing and wires and he was… _Primus and Unicron_ … he was going to die. Even if the warframe hadn't been stomping up to him to finish the job, there was no way the damage he'd taken thus far was going to repair itself.

The fire suppression cleared and through a fritzing HUD, he saw xe line xir charge rifle up with his spark and he shut off his optics. He didn't want to see the blast that would kill him. He was falling into stasis anyway.

Which was why he could have been hallucinating when he thought he heard the deep voice, felt the EM field shift to _recognition_ - _confusion_ , "Smokescreen?"

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"Come on lazy-struts. Medevacs are swamped right now and and there's nothing critically wrong with you." The grumpy voice was accompanied by a light shock that brought him from a light healing stasis into the cold, harsh realm of the online. Iacon, he automatically identified the accent. Aggressively Iaconian, but not that of a noble. Which was unusual. Educated… yes. "You can walk with the rest of the refugees."

He turned on his optics. They met the blue ones of a red and white medic, who's faceplate seemed designed for the irritated scowl that now graced it, but his EM field was more _stress-overwork-grief-too much to do_ than angry. "Good," the medic continued sharply. "Now, after you answer a few basic questions for me, you can get out of my medevac. You're taking up valuable space."

"Medevac?" that didn't make sense. The last thing he remembered was that Decepticon about to kill him. "I thought I was dead."

The scowl deepened. "You should be, but Primus must favor you. A Decepticon dropped you off at our triage area — said xe owed you a favor — and as soon as my medic scanned your IFF I got orders that you were a priority one patient and if I let you die I was going to be shot for treason. Want to tell me how a neutral gets that sort of pull?"

This didn't make sense. Not at all. "I don't know. I don't know any Autobots or Decepticons. I've never left Praxus."

The medic made a grumpy huff through his vents. "Well someone knows you. The Decepticon said that if you remembered xer, it would be under the name 'Lilac'? That help?"

Smokescreen wracked his processor. It wasn't familiar at all. All he could come up with was the knowledge — abstract — that Praxan indentured pleasure bots had flower names, but the name itself didn't mean anything more specific. "No. I've never met xer."

A scowl. "Fine. I'll leave it for the interrogators to dig out of you, if they think its relevant." That statement made Smokescreen quiver. "Let's get this over with. Standard questions: What's your name and what's the last thing you remember?"

"Smokescreen," he answered easily, they already had his IFF codes. "I was in the casino. The Decepticon — Chainraider — attacked and killed the security officers. I tried to get the civilians out, but that left me on the floor with xir and we fought. Then waking up here."

"You fell into stasis due to energon loss. We had you on a drip for three orns while I picked out all the shrapnel. Stand up. As soon as your gyros recalibrate themselves you're walking with the rest of the refugees."

He did as the medic ordered and stood, bracing himself against the wall until the room stopped spinning. "Refugees? Walking where?"

"Iacon," for a moment the _grief_ in the medic's field swamped over the other emotions, "Praxus is gone."

Gone. The word hit him like one of the Decepticon's charge blasts. Gone. His own field went blank with shock. How could the casinos and the gardens and the corporations, the entire city, just be gone?

"Whoa. Easy." The medic caught him as he staggered. "Don't let your systems go into shock. I don't have the resources to treat more of that right now."

No. He wouldn't, would he, if there were other survivors, more refugees, than just him. With an effort Smokescreen regained control of himself. "The Decepticons?" he asked. His voice still sounded thready and weak to his own audios, but his spark was slowing and systems settling like he forced them to do when he sat at the table. Every hand's a winner, he reminded himself, and even if it's not, act like it.

Another snort from the medic. "Who else?"

Yes. Of course. Who else? Truthfully Smokescreen could think of half a dozen other people who might want to wipe Praxus off the map, but it had been a Decepticon rampaging through the casino ionizing the air with _hatred-revenge_ and so it made sense that that had been only a small part of the attack. "What now?"

"Now you walk to Iacon, we figure things out from there." The medic finally let him go, now that it seemed like his patient wasn't going to fall over. "Someone up top knows who you are, but all I have is your IFF. What do you want me to put in your records?"

Control the battlefield, control the battle. "I'm Smokescreen," he said simply, "and I'm just a gambler."

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End

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Note: For more information on who Lilac/Chainraider is and why xe might feel xe owes Smokescreen a favor, read chapter two of Sin City. It's probably too soon to say that xe will never show up again, but I have no plans for xer to have more than those two appearances.


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